Ogoid said:
There are hints everywhere that things are not going well at all, from the existence of "high fatality roads"
Road fatalities are common in Australia, especially in holiday periods, where they usually reach double digits (at least in NSW). The sign doesn't say over what period of time the fatalities reached the 57 figure, but that's not a particuarly high number in of itself.
to Dispatch stating MFP officers aren't allowed to sell fuel,
I saw that as evidence of potential corruption more than signs of an oil shortage.
apparently private tow truck owners running after a police chase,
Is that out of character for today? I mean, okay, sure, but if the police are using the private sector to help them out, I don't see that in of itself as a sign of the end times.
lights flickering at the nightclub Goose goes to,
My bathroom lights flicker sometimes.
Just saying...
the rundown state of the MFP's "Halls of Justice",
True, but again, is that signs of societal collapse, or a lack of budget/corruption?
not to mention their treatment of suspects, e.g. Johnny the Boy (they literally just have the guy wrapped up in chains),
Police brutality still exists.
andgenerally Toecutter and his bunch taking control of small cities and running amok, terrorizing the locals for at least a day until there's any law enforcement available to do anything about it, at which point they're long gone.
Fair enough, but bikies could easily do that today as well. I've been through my share of small towns in Australia, as well as other countries. If bikies turned up in the numbers that Toecutter and co. did, the locals couldn't do much even IF society was still functioning.
True, it's not what people have come to expect from a "post-apocalyptic" setting since 1981... but that's one of its greatest virtues in my eyes.
Fair enough. I can certainly get why people (yourself included) can see the film as being post-apocalyptic/near-collapse. I just don't think the film does enough to show it, and at times, is contradictory about it. I get the "show, don't tell" rule, but would it be too much to ask for a newscast via TV or radio? Discuss what things are like in the country (not just state) and beyond? You could call this lazy writing if you want, but a little bit of context can go a long way.
BreakfastMan said:
In the whole canon of the genre, yeah I think it is safe to say that WOT is important. Being more "underground" doesn't mean it isn't important. See: Velvet Underground.
Okay, but why is it important? I can accept that 2001: A Space Odyssey is important, even if I don't like it. But WoT? I've never come across anyone cite WoT as an inspiration for them. I haven't seen its tropes adapted (granted, its tropes were already popularized by LotR). It's never really received any major adaptations bar a comic series. The only piece of inspiration I've arguably seen is Brandon Sanderson, but as much as I love Sanderson's writing and his works, his style is like night and day compared to Jordan. And yes, while he did write an essay on how Jordan influenced his writing, I don't see any evidence of that in his own works.
I'd say that if someone (or something's) important, it needs some kind of external legacy/influence. And TBH, I can't say that WoT has displayed that.
Addendum_Forthcoming said:
It is an inherently bad thing. It's like spending pages describing solely how magic works.
There's an entire chapter in the fourth Harry Potter novel dedicated to describing how the Three Unforgivable Curses work. It's one of the most engrossing chapters in the novel, because it recontextualizes a lot of prior material, sets the stage for a lot of further material, and gives us a good sense of how the 'rules' work for the curses, since they're repeatedly used by the antagonists. Part of why it's engaging isn't just because of this though, it's because of the character reactions to them - Neville is terrified of the Cruciatus curse (for reasons we don't learn until much later), Harry surviving Advada Kadavra becomes even more shocking, etc.
You can write these kinds of things well.
Not a character's perspective on it ... simply describing everything about a lightsaber.
You try it.
It's awful
There's a segment in one of the old EU novels where Luke describes the feeling of holding Anakin's lightsaber for the first time. It's only a paragraph or so, but it adds a lot of depth to the original scene.
If that dragged on for pages and pages, sure, but you seem to be advocating that any kind of description or worldbuilding is inherently negative. If I spent four pages on a lightsaber all at once, it would be pretty bad (unless I did a Rowling or Herbert and made it engaging). If the info of that four pages was spread out, then it becomes much more paletable.
and a perfect example of a pitfall of purple prose.
Purple prose is writing that's overly elaborate or ornate. It can apply to worldbuilding, but to basically any form of writing. For instance, in the current Firefly story I'm writing, here's an excerpt:
A jingle began to play as Edgar began talking about the results of the 194th Annual Persephone World Fencing Championships. Zoe picked up the remote and shut the holo off ? she didn?t care about fencing championships, and aside from maybe Inara, doubted anyone on this boat did either. Instead, she just lay there. Listening to River?s breathing. To the hum of the ship, and the turning of worlds. The music of the spheres played, but as always, it was dissonant. Yet not so dissonant that it could keep her awake forever. She needed sleep. The type of sleep that part of her wished to never wake up from.
None of that is related to worldbuilding, yet it's still bordering purple prose. Part of the reason why I go back to chapters numerous times while writing them and tone it down.
Dare I say, Star Wars: ANH would be shit if Kenobi pulled out lecture slides and was shown teaching Luke how to disassemble and reassemble his lightsaber like a good soldier should know how to. It's almost as if they cut out showing how Luke built his lightsaber for a reason in RotJ.
It wouldn't be shit, but that says more about a film's pacing restrictions than the know-how of a lightsaber. I'm pretty sure there's an EU work that deals with Luke building his lightsaber anyway. I could easily see that in a book, if the construction was used as something beyond just the sake of showing the construction in of itself.
You know what is one of the most egregious examples of whiny I find with Star Wars geeks? When I mention how I thought the swordplay in TFA was infinitely better than all the nonsense circus act garbage in the prequel trilogy,
No.
Better than AotC? Sure. Apart from that? No.
and they talk my ear off of made up fucking nonsense 'sabre fighting styles'. Just ... no ... no. I laughed. Because the original trilogy had a sword master as part of the fight choreography ... the prequel trilogy used a circus performer, and it shows.
They also show Jedi at the peak of their power, and makes the lightsaber a viable weapon in its universe.
The duels don't do as well on the emotive angle mind you, but Last Jedi fixed that.
TFA seems to ditch realism but thank FUCK it also ditched the circus performance act to give us a brutal, more visceral style of fighting with weaponry.
Swinging your lightsaber around madly in the hope of hitting something?
Look at this shit ... and no amount of esoteric, bullshit lore will make up for it. No one important gives a shit about "Shi'cho" or Shiz'ko or Shish'kebab whatever fucking nonsense ... fuck anybody that says otherwise.
Lots of people care. Just because you don't doesn't give you the right to say "fuck anybody" who does.
And I say this who doesn't care myself, even if the use of Form was woven adroitly into the Revenge of the Sith novelization.
I've tried to rewrite a scene of a film in 3rd Person ... the environment, character actions, dialogue, pacing ... and 1 minute of an action packed movie is like 6k words.
You're doing something wrong then. I've novelized plenty of cartoons/movies/games/comics before, including as part of exercises I did in the CCE writing courses I did back in the day. How good (or bad) they are is up to the reader, but there's no way you need 6000 words for 1 minute of screentime. If it's an action scene, you need even less words - action scenes require very high word economies to function in writing, with it being preferable to use short, sharp sentences, rather than a more flowing narrative. It's part of why I hate writing action scenes in general, but I still write them as best I can when the story calls for it.
Turns out writing is hard
I know writing is hard, I've been writing for over a decade.
that films can show a metric fuckton more than books.
Unless you mean "show" as in "visuals," no, they can't. Not if we're doing a 1:1 comparison.
Again, name an adaptation of a book that has more worldbuilding than the book it's based on.
Moreover, books are beholden to literary critique and standards of writing in a way that film isn't in terms of the pure basics of storytelling.
Films are still reviewed and held to a standard.
No ... it literally can't. What books tell really well is the ability to tailor POV. But it can never 'panorama' better than film.
Yes, and? What does this have to do with worldbuilding?
It seems you're equating worldbuilding with wordpainting. Those are two different concepts.
Actually sit down and try to write out a scene of your favourite action movie from simply 3rd Person. As simple as it gets. I'll be waiting 2 weeks for you to get it done to the same quality as scriptwriters and the means of following the scene to conclusion. Yet it will take only a minute of your time to show that on the big screen.
That I've done this kind of thing before aside, what does this have to do with worldbuilding? A novel has to write out its scenes, a film can show a lot quickly. Again, what does this have to do with worldbuilding? A film can do it quicker, but a novel can do it more in-depth.
Trying to explain that in enough clarity in a book that it doesn't start sounding like a historical text describing military SOP, or just a mess of florid prose because you're afraid of boring your reader, is very fucking hard.
Again, wordpainting, not worldbuilding. You've shifted the argument entirely.
Or to phrase it the correct way, since when has a book ever delivered the density of information as a film without being fucking impenetrable?
A film has never delivered as much density as a novel in regards to imparting the details of its world.
Again, 2001: A Space Odyssey. The film allows you to infer a lot of what's going on through its visuals. But the level of information imparted is dwarfed by the novel.
That Filipinos do that despite earning less than what a cop would make in Australia. Buying an ice cream and going to the beach isn't exactly a statement of wellbeing... nor that the world isn't going to shit.
Part of the "going to shit" angle is an oil shortage - how much oil are they using to do that? And if the roads are without law and order, is that really the safest thing to do?
There's a reason why Winston and Julia don't visit the beach in 1984 after all.
You could still buy a beer on the beach in Darwin, Australia, 1942... despite Japanese air raids. In fact... after Darwin was wiped off the map in February, 1942... you could still buy booze the next day. Probably a bad idea to go to the portside beach... give or take 2 months for them to clean it up.
Yeah, sure, but there wasn't a breakdown of society in WWII in Australia. The film supposedly shows otherwise.
The fact that these vehicles are the last of the Interceptors. The last police issue V8. Dated, no longer in factory circulation, police have to haggle to get them, suggests a dystopian setting of a future Australia far removed from the police forces of 1979. That the police are carrying a multitude of different weapons, including sawn-off break opens rather than a Browning HP (which suggests they're trying to make do with common civilian firearms and easily sourceable ammunition types)?
I'll have to take your word for it, know only slightly more about firearms than I do about cars.
That it's set over a decade afterwards, a society and justice system in utter shambles, is proof of a societal collapse event. It is alien to the Australia in 1979 of its release. And the movie is purposefully set at least a decade in the future.
Thought it was "a few years from now."
You mentioned Miller saying it takes place a decade from when it was filmed, but those are two different timeframes. And as I discussed up above (like, way above, with a different user in this post), I don't think the film does enough to illustrate a supposed collapse, if that's what's going on.
How Macaffee talks about the conflict. How he tells Max about giving people back their heroes? He sounds like a government spokesperson of a nation that is crumbling apart. It sounds like the desperate speech a police chief would give to idealistic police officers, trying to rally them to the cause that already appears lost.
"They say people don't believe in heroes anymore? Well, damn them! You and me, Max, we're gonna give 'em back their heroes!"
Or it's banal, cliched dialogue that could be applied to any work of fiction that involves the police in a less than ideal spot.
The "Main Force Patrol" is a fictional institution. Established in a future where there is little peace to be found. Which suggests the government's efforts to maintain any basic semblance of civility and order is failing.
If you say so, but if every fictional police unit in fiction is evidence of failing society, then that's a hell of a lot of failing societies.
And besides, we know nothing about what's going on apart from the rural areas that we see. There's a mention or two of "Sun City" or something, but we have no idea what life is like in the cities, or anywhere else for that matter. To quote another post-apocalyptic Australian story, take 'The Big Dry'. The atmospheric phenomenon is never explained (least in the stage play, can't comment on the book - cue worldbuilding advantages), but its geographic reach at least is (Australia is fucked, rest of the world seems to be fine). Mad Max offers us no such insight.
And even the government's capacity to maintain it is all but finished.
And yet government buracracy still exists to get Johnny released...
The government's still functioning enough to give due process. So, again, is the MFP's poor shape due to the breakdown of society? Or is it due to government/police corruption?
In the context of the Mad Max mythos, I can answer it as being the former. In the context of the film by itself, my inclination was towards the latter. Heck, Affi basically tells his officers to "do whatever you want, just keep the paperwork clean" afterwards.
There is no other police force out there. The MFP is the only thing that stands between citizens and roving gangs of murderers, rapists, vandals and thieves.
I can infer that, but what evidence of this is there apart from Toecutter's gang? Great, a group of bikies is terrorising small towns in regional Australia. That isn't exactly a hard thing to do.